A drone looks a lot like a cloned helicopter. Indeed, it's like a
quad-copter (a helicopter with four rotors) - at least, the one
I was introduced to was. And the one I was introduced to was really
tiny in comparison to a commercial or a military drone. It
was less than 10" along its longest diagonal. It was equipped with a
high-resolution camera on its
leading edge
that articulated, keeping me eerily in its direct line of sight at all
times. And with two dark sensors added above and on each side of its
camera, it had a face uncannily resembling a frog's. I named it
"Kermit" which I printed on a tapewriter and stuck to its back.
The drone was maneuvered by a control unit about the size of a
smartphone. Indeed, the control unit had a docking station to hold a
smartphone which provided a visual of the drone's camera-eye-view on
its screen. The control unit had two joysticks for the pilot to direct
the drone's up / down, forward / backward, left / right movements, and
speed. There are a few commands the drone's control unit will override.
It will force the drone to return home if its rechargeable battery runs
low. But to be sure, if its pilot keeps ignoring and / or interfering
with the drone's alerts that it's returning home, it will crash out of
the sky when its battery runs out. And it will override if its pilot
attempts to fly it into an object that would cause it damage eg a tree
or a
body of water.
What occurred to me as I took it all in (look: I've been around tech
since 1970, and though I've been blown away by each and every new
version, release, generation, and tech iteration I've worked with since
then, nothing got me like this) is that the
idea of drones may be new, but each of their components
aren't. That's right. We already had an understanding of helicopter
rotor technology. We already had high-resolution digital cameras. We
already had radio and bluetooth technology for
communicating commands and signals between digital devices. We already
had the technology for transmitting photographic images over very long
distances (the New Horizons spacecraft transmitted clear photographs
back to us from 3.7 billion miles away). We already had it all.
So when you add miniaturization to all of the above, the
emergence of drones was all but inevitable, fait accompli,
coming (if you will) not from some lone dramatically new innovation but
rather from a confluence of technology ie existing
technologies coming together in combination for use in new purposes.
When I wrote my first Fortran (Formula
translation) computer program in 1970 by punching holes in cards
for a computer which was driven by vacuum tubes and had no screen (yet)
to read, those little holes in that deck of punched cards brought with
them today's smartphones and drones like a possibility. On their
shoulders were built the next technologies, and on theirs were built
the next etc. Suddenly there's all this: smartphones, drones, the
internet (and not just the internet, but "the internet of
things"), not to mention all those retail outlets that don't
take cash anymore. Is this a bad thing or a
good thing?
Time will tell. It is what it is. And to be clear, whether it's a bad
thing or a good thing is not in the scope of this essay. What
is in the scope of this essay is how life begets life, how
possibility begets
possibility. Sometimes we refer to this as evolution,
sometimes we don't. Either way it's worth looking at intently, taking
it all in. When we do, we
discover
how to really drive. We learn to get our hands and feet on
the levers, dials, and pedals of what it is to be
human.
